Tokyo Hold'Em: Return of the Yokai
Cast Andrew Kishino as Kawakuro Ryuunosukexmm. Wilsondescribed the character as "handsome, suave, silver-tongued, rich - and utterly malignant". On his character, Kishino said "He seems to exert a sinister influence over people; he's very manipulative and ruthless. But he can appear so refined and charming on the outside." Andy Serkis as Tesso. Serkis described Tesso as a "malformed, twisted creature". Elaborating, Serkis stated "When you learn the story of who he was and how he became what he is today, you can't help but feel sorry for him." Ian McShane as Mizuchi, a Japanese dragon god and the main antagonist of the film. Rinko Kikuchi as, a robotics programmer who helped build Yokai World. Kayley Cuoco as Ryuunosuke's secretary Production At S89 Expo, Jackson and Gilmore confirmed the possibility of at least two more sequels, each based on a specific genre of film. Jackson commented they were searching for ideas for the sequel, but they were thinking around the idea of "a modern fantasy movie; bringing an aspect of myth and legend into the modern world, in a way that's never really been portrayed before". On April 24, 2012, Bongo Studios announced that it would be titled Tokyo Hold'Em: Return of the Yokai. In June 2012, Jackson gave details about the film's plot: "It's set in Japan, at this amusement park themed after yokai, monsters from Japanese folklore. There are employees dressed as kappas, there are cuddly tanukis in the gift shop, there are rides based on Japanese folklore... Sort of imagine a weird version of Disneyland. It’s a very funny story about a certain way of life that a young dinosaur has trouble fitting into and he ends up going on this quest. He kind of messes up and he has to put everything right by going on this quest and on that quest he meets this character that is an outcast from his society too and so the two of them form this bond and it becomes this unique kind of story..." The filmmakers wanted to explore the changing face of Japan, and what happens to old beliefs as it changes. Peterson stated: "Japan, only a century ago, was a very unindustrialised country. Now, they're leading the world in electronics and are a global superpower." Jackson said the inspiration for the movie came from a childhood love of Godzilla films. On August 9, 2013, it was announced at the S89 Expo that Ian McShane, Toby Kebbel and Patrick Dempsey had joined the cast of the film. Revisions By summer 2013, Peterson and Walker had been removed from the film due to story problems. Peterson, who could not crack the film's third act, was absent from the D23 Expo, where Sohn and producer Denise Ream presented footage from the film. , 's president, explained the departure: "All directors get really deep in their film. Sometimes you just need a different perspective to get the idea out. Sometimes directors... are so deeply embedded in their ideas it actually takes someone else to finish it up." Jackson moved on to Unnamed Simpsons Fantasy Series, and was replaced by Sian Wilson. On the subject of changing directors, Ream stated "Sadly, it happens more often than any of us would like... It's given a lot of thought and care. Nathan is still a beloved member of Bongo Studios. He helps out on a lot of the movies. We care about him, but he just needed help getting the movie done." David Silverman, Matthew Nastuk and Rob Oliver stepped in temporarily to work on various sections of the film, in order to reduce Wilson's workload. In September 2013, The Good Dinosaur was pushed back from May 30, 2014 to November 25, 2015 (the scheduled release date for Pixar's ). According to Ream, the primary reason for the rescheduling was "the story was not working, period, full stop, it just was not where it needed to be." In November 2013, due to the delay, Pixar laid off 67 employees of its 1,200-person workforce, following the closure of a month before, when about 80 employees had been laid off, officially to refocus Pixar's efforts at its main headquarters. In August 2014, Lithgow revealed in an interview that the film had been dismantled and "completely reimagined" and that he was expected to re-record his role in the next month, while mentioning that McDormand was still part of the film. In November 2014, it was reported that new elements had been added to the story. David Silverman stated "We all liked the movie from the beginning, but... the story had some kind of fatal flaws in it that none of us really saw. It was kind of a Journey to the West story. It was a very different kind of movie – there was a whole yokai ecosystem and so forth. It was one where the yokai had kind of been persecuted by the humans and driven into hiding. It never quite felt right. It just didn’t feel like it resonated truly." Silverman additionally explained: "We give people the chance to work on a story, and we give them our support, but it doesn't always work out... there were story issues that were just not solvable. So we changed the story to make it better, and we're very proud of the film we have now." In October 2014, Wilson was announced as the new director of the film. Wilson recalled: "In the original version of the film, the decline of the yokai was much more of a literal thing. Persecution from superstitious humans would have brought the yokai into hiding. It was dramatic, but at the same time it never resonated truly. The film just became too dark. Nathan's first pitch was about the death of old beliefs, and so when I took it I said, 'I want to honor that as much as I can.' So we changed it, and made it more metaphorical; the yokai disappear as belief in them disappears." In June 2015, it was announced that the majority of the cast had been revised. Aside from the series cast, only McShane retained his role in the film. It was revealed that Kebbel had been replaced by Andy Serkis, and Dempsey had been replaced by Andrew Kishino. Arlo's three siblings, to be voiced by Harris, Hader, and Greer had been cut down to a single brother named Buck, voiced by Marcus Scribner, and later, a sister named Libby, voiced by Maleah Padilla. On the cast revisions, Sohn explained: "It was all about finding a younger Arlo, it was really about finding a boy play Arlo, so that we could push into that idea of him growing up and becoming a man, so the actor previous – who is a great actor – he was already a man, and so I needed to push that arc and find that compassionate kid, so that was the major kind of change. Then everything else, all the other characters that supported that story came in and out and changed and evolved and through that evolution, some of those performers changed out of it." It was also confirmed that the farmer aspect was still part of the film. Mizuchi (voiced by Ian McShane) is the first definitely supernatural antagonist of the film series. Wilson commented on this change, by saying "It was important to find a good villain. And the previous villains were so good, it was pretty difficult to figure out where we could go from there. You can't go crazy because Lucille was crazy. You can't go brawler because Marutas was brawler. You can't go smarter because Hamilton was smarter. Where can you go? You have to go supernatural, bigger and more intimidating. He's a villain that they are completely unequipped to face". Wilson also announced that Return of the Yokai would be the first film in a new Treehouse of Horror trilogy. Design In interviews at Comic-Con, Wilson discussed the creature designs. For the creatures that would be featured, she and the design crew wanted to create creatures that were unique in film. The film's designers include Wayne Barlowe, Oscar Chichoni, monster sculptors David Meng and Simon Lee, and Hellboy II and The Hobbit designer Francisco Ruiz Velasco. They used realistic inspirations, such as animals, as well as the creature designs of Willis O'Brien and Ray Harryhausen. Wilson commented "The way I tried to view it was to imagine the yokai were real creatures and someone in feudal Japan saw them and ran back to tell everyone about them and was trying their best to remember and draw them. And in our film you get to see them for real." Wilson also stated "We wanted them to seem essentially outlandish in a way, but on the other hand you realize they come sort of in families: you've got the reptilian monsters, the insect monsters, the mammalian monsters... So to take an outlandish design and then render it with an attention to real animal anatomy and detail is interesting." The production team designed 15 unique "species" of yokai, each with its own unique features. Each yokai was given a vaguely humanoid silhouette to echo the man-in-suit aesthetic of early Japanese Kaiju films Since Tesso was once human, he was designed to look more anthropomorphic than the other yokai; with more of a humanoid form and human-like hands and feet. Elements of Serkis' face were incorporated into Tesso, with Wilson saying "It was very important for me to see Andy Serkis in this creature, to allow audiences to forge a connection with him. We also needed to separate him from the other yokai, because he comes from a different source to them.". Knifehead, the first Kaiju to appear in the film, is a tribute to the plodding kaiju of 1960s Japanese films, and is intended to look almost like a man in a rubber suit; its head was inspired by that of a . The kappa, the turtle-like yokai which attack Bart and Lisa, is a favorite of Wilson, who conceived it as a "brawler with this sort of beer belly". The creature was designed as a fusion of various freshwater reptiles and amphibians; it has the beak and shell of a snapping turtle, frog-like limbs, a long, flattened salamander-like tail and an extendable, frog-like, tongue. The tengu were the hardest creatures to design. Originally, the designs were more straightforward "bird-men" but Wilson thought the designs looked ridiculous; "they just looked like men in bad bird costumes", she recalled. The creatures were redesigned to look more monstrous, with various features incorporated into the body; a long, snake-like neck, a vulturine body with clawed wings and taloned, eagle-like, feet and a long, lizard-like tail. The , the Kaiju that orphans Mako Mori, resembles a fusion of a horseshoe crab and a tarantula. Mizuchi went through a major design change late on in production. "In Nathan's original script, Mizuchi was actually a four-legged dragon," Wilson said. "The design was a lot bulkier and heavily built. But we realized that once you saw him performing — the design wasn't very good. It just seemed like things we've seen in other films. We realized you can't have him be this four-legged creature with wings on his back, it just doesn't work. We realised he needed to be seriously redesigned. So we tried a design that was more serpent-like, with the wings that were the arms, properly, and this sort of slithering motion. We also did a lot of cosmetic alterations; we made him look more reptilian, removing a lot of the features we thought were cheesy, like the catfish 'beard', to make him look more intimidating." The "beard"